Take a Tour of the Country’s Weirdest Architectural Attractions

The Great American Road Trip has been done before; last year, Atlas Obscura published a detailed history of the first coast-to-coast car trek from California to New York City, 121 years ago. Jack Kerouac made it counterculture. Simon and Garfunkel made it soulful. Architecture critic and curator John Margolies made it iconic: Beginning in 1972, Margolies  traveled off the beaten path to photograph America’s roadside architectural marvels. Beginning in 2005, the Library of Congress acquired his images, making them easily accessible. Now, even if you’re trapped in your office on these long summer days, you can voyage through the country’s smallest towns and weirdest vintage attractions via the thousands of images available for public use.

Margolies held an editorial position at Architectural Record and organized exhibitions with the Architectural League. In 1970, he curated a show of the work of Morris Lapidus, who at the time designed hotels in Florida in the style of what is now considered Miami Modernism. Titled "The Architecture of Joy," the exhibit, as characterized by Ada Louise Huxtable, was "presented as an exercise in mid-American, mid-20th-century popular taste in art and what 90 percent of the American public really likes and wants." She enjoyed such design for its "intimate revelations of the pop mentality" that she called "mind-blowing," but also critiqued the notion that elevating such a style into an "esthetic pantheon" was "intellectual baloney…uninspired superschlock."

But Margolies’s reverence for vernacular buildings and whimsical oddities continued. Over the next 40 years, he’d shoot 11,000 photos in which viewers find attractions like Maxie, the World’s Largest Goose, in Sumner, Missouri, or the Giant Artichoke in Castro, California. Two personal favorites, a dueling set of giant chest drawers (one is a building) are set against blue skies in High Point, North Carolina; The Iceberg Restaurant in Tulsa, Oklahoma, appears to be melting in the prairie sun. There are hundreds of mini golf figures shot on courses around the country, as well as old-school diners with angular neon signs, giant figures of cowboys, dinosaurs, and Paul Bunyan parks and rest areas.

The online collections feature hundreds of motels, as well. Some follow the quintessential Motel 6 configuration—stacked units connected via outdoor walkways. Many feature cottage and court-style stops. Myriad standalone mini-homes like the Fairyland Cottages in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, or the Pemi Motor Court in North Woodstock, New Hampshire, are perhaps sweeter examples of tourist accommodations beyond freeway Holiday Inns.

"Although much of the architecture Margolies documented was well past its heyday by the time he photographed it, he rejected the word ‘nostalgia’ in describing his work, stating, ‘I don’t want to be ahead of my time. I want to be in sync with it,’" reads a Library of Congress article. Maybe Margolies didn’t want us to be nostalgic for the days when McDonald’s restaurants deployed their golden arches as architectural features; perhaps he doesn’t want Los Angelenos to mourn the loss of the giant Arby’s cowboy hat, or long for when you and your father would drive 600 miles to go fishing, to stay at a lodge where a giant fish is the literal front door. Millennials in the room might remember A Goofy Movie’s road trip montage—old-school diners with modernist EAT HERE signs, amusement parks, and a cameo by The World’s Largest House of Yarn. Margolies’s images confirm that these were canonical to the American road-less-traveled. The vernacular, the weird, and the wild live in our swirling cultural memory. Today, at least we can savor the Longaberger Picnic Basket building, which will soon become a new roadside hotel.

Top photo by Robert Margolies. Bomber gas station, diagonal view, Route 99 E., Milwaukie, Oregon. 

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